Bestia Parvulus
by Andrea Foxx
Summary: All beasts are in a way, like us. But we are the tamers of horses, makers of swords, speakers of tongues, and thinkers of wide thoughts. There are many men one could call beastly, and I suspect there are some beasts that would make fine men. GxZ platonic
1. Chapter 1

_We are disappointed in you, son of Din's heart._

_Your methods were effective, but brutal._

_They consumed you. Did you not think We were ignorant to your hand, pulling Our hammer for your own folly? Did you truly think the heavens would ebb and flow to your will, that you could bend Us?_

_It is not so._

_You are Our needle, and what strength we let you is Our thread. The needle does not take control of the one that holds it. Though you might prick, you have become rusted for lack of handling. We must see to you once more._

_Do not fear us, child. We are disappointed, yes. But rust may yet be shed. Tarnish may be polished clean. And We have not forgotten that you have been long, long overdue. You are precious to Us, and cherished. By Us, and by the world._

_We will not let you lie alone, forgotten at the bottom of our graces. We do labor over you. We are your true mother._

_You who know little love, feel loved by Us. Know the stain of history that now consumes you. But for a time, embrace simplicity. Be washed clean. Never will you be a white needle. But innocence is not the only facet of this world. We love you as you are. Start afresh, if never pure._

_Fouled, you suffer. It wounds us that it is your own doing._

_This is why you disappoint us._

_You will try yet again some other time. There will always be another try._

_But for a while, know relief from this form you have abused. Let your eyes see simply, without the film of malice. Let your heart persist and flourish without it. May the etchings of your soul come to bear, but let simple memory sleep for a time._

_And wake when it is time to learn._

–


	2. Chapter 2

"Why must I go on hunt?"

The Princess Zelda VI frowned up at her mother, Queen Zelda V. It was the third time she had asked the question, the first being when she had eavesdropped on her father's study weeks ago. The second had been when the Marquess Ordon province had introduced his son to the court. This was the first time she had gotten her answer, having asked only her mother.

"It's expected. Your father wants you to learn of the court, and this is outside the stuffy gowns you despise, hm?" her mother said, sitting in the red chair. A handmaiden folded some simpler dresses into the baggage, ignoring the young princess kicking her knees idly by the bedside.

"But I'm not a knight. Or one of their ladies," said the princess Zelda. "The men are all crude, and the riding's hard."

"I do not agree with your father, but the good lord Ordon insists. Please make this one sacrifice for us, and know that I don't think of you as a child anymore," said the Queen. The hinted smile trimmed the edge off of her words. "You are a fine rider, better than half of the knights there!"

"I like horses. They're nicer than sewing," the girl frowned. "Mother? Why do they go on hunt at all?"

The queen smiled. "Heavens to Din, I don't know. Perhaps they prove their manhood that way. I have never understood it. They ride to slay beasts."

"But didn't a beast save us all?"

"Where did you hear that?"

The princess wove her fingers uncomfortably. "Captain Link told me."

Zelda V laughed. It was not her usual forced, polite laugh, the princess noted. It was gasping, from the belly: high and almost wild in mirth. "He would," she said. "Would you like to hear the whole story, dearest?"

The young Zelda nodded vigorously.

"Well, I'll begin. Once upon a time, there was a terrible force. It wasn't a dark one, but even great forces can have angry people behind them. Or sad people. Or even evil people. This force was not one from our world. It was a dusky sort of force."

"Like a big sunset?"

"Yes, exactly. And like twilight, it cast an evening of the mind on those it touched. It put many into a deep sleep where their bodies wasted and their souls kept awake by evil buzzing insects. It bred monsters, turned the most wicked souls into foul creatures that once infested our world."

"And then be beast came to eat them all up!"

"Shh." said the Queen. "This dusky force came for a man, and it took away his body, left his heart. But the goddesses didn't like that. This man was a special one, already picked just in case something terrible happened. So when the dusk took away his body, the goddesses gave him a new one. It turned him into a divine beast, there to exact judgment on this outside force."

"Why a beast? Aren't beasts savage?"

"Exactly. The beast was savage, yes. But all beasts do what they must to survive. And this one, sewn with a caring essence, was a great warrior against the dusk. He was not the enemy of men, because for a time there were no men to be fought. Only a cruel force, something mad that did not think. The beast needed his ferocity."

"So he was different?"

"All beasts are in a way, like us," the Queen said. "But what separates us is that we are the tamers of horses, makers of swords, speakers of tongues, and thinkers of wide thoughts. Though there are many men one could call beastly, and I suspect there are some beasts that would make fine men."

The princess giggled. "I see dogs talking over dinner wine," she said. "Maybe some of the knights fighting at bones under the tables."

"Wouldn't that be a sight?" smiled the queen. "There was indeed a monster of a man behind the force. To fight him, the gods gave back the Beast's true form as a soldier of light and that divine warrior engaged in battle. In the end, that soldier that had been the beast won in the end."

"You were there, weren't you?"

The Queen paused. "Yes," she said, after a long pause.

"So was the one you fought a beastish man, or a mannish beast?" asked Zelda

"Honestly, I do not know," said her mother. "He once had been a man, yes. But one with too much sorrow in his heart and too much acid in his wounds. That's what happens when a man is left behind, betrayed by the world and left to die alone and in pain. It festered, stripped his eyes of light, made him into a monster of suffering. He had suffered so much he spread it like an evil disease. And he suffered in the end, too."

"Why does it matter?"

"Because you're going on hunt," said the Queen sternly. "Beasts will suffer before you're through. Well, that's the whole story. I hope that fills in a few of the holes that the Captain told you."

"Is it okay for beasts to suffer?"

The Queen stood. "That's for you to decide."

–

The Princess Zelda tried to convince herself that this was her first big adventure. She had been outside Castle Town before on caravan, but never riding without her mother, or father, or any of her guardsman. Yes, several of the more prestigious knights were in their ride, but it was not the same. It was noble ladies, and noble men, and her alone. It was an adventure, crashing through the brush with the archers on either side of her. The men whooped and hollered, laughing gaily, and the women tittered behind her back.

Zelda rode with the archers and the hunters and hounds, trying to avoid the whole mess. It wasn't proper, but she could veil it with childish ignorance. And it kept the Marquess Ordon away from her. Zelda liked riding. She liked the one-two-three of the hooves on the ground, feeling it tear under her and the trees go speeding by.

They'd caught one young buck earlier. It had gone down quickly-- hocks ripped to shreds by the dogs, an arrow in its eye. The men had tried to hide it from her, but Zelda had seen its bloody stare and its single-minded fear right as they had ended its struggle. The buck had since been dragged back by serving boys to the country hall, to be prepared for the feast.

It was at that pause that they had spied a young boar in the underbrush, barely taller than a woman's calf, and the party had immediately set to running it down for sport. There had been no hesitation in it. Another animal was seen, the hounds set after it, and they were off again.

The men cursed. For such a scrawny animal, it was persistent and cutty. It led them through a thorny gambit that made the dogs whine with pain at the brambles, breaking into a swath of burned, young pinewoods. The ground was relatively free of brush, yet it raced along just past the snapping jaws of the hounds far ahead.

But as Zelda's horse began to sweat again, the dogs began to scream just over the rise of the hill. The men cried out in victory-- the barking and snarling was shot through with scrapes of leaves and dirt. And as their line of chargers stood on the cusp of the shallow hill, the hunt party saw that the hounds had caught up and were attacking the boar.

One of the Knight Lords there cursed in anger. It had been his dogs on the hunt, and the boar had slain one: bashed it in against a rock and snapped its neck. At the loss of a dog, the pack circled and bit at the prey's hocks, causing it to squeal and charge violently. Zelda stared at it, facing down seven trained hounds, with a bit of wonder.

What a brave little beast, she thought.

That was when she saw Sir Knight... she had forgotten his name already... whistle for the lagging servant boy with the supplies. He motioned at the baggage on the donkey, and the squire unwrapped a long oilskin bundle. He handed to the knight a shaft of heavy wood, tipped with a long metal head like a war blade. There was a thick crosspiece where oak met steel. The whole thing looked tremendously heavy to Zelda, and the squire asked if the knight intended to dismount. The knight replied no.

The spearhead was almost as large as the young boar's whole face. Zelda realized in horror what was about to happen. It seemed wrong. The deer was a running beast, and had been outrun fairly and dealt with swiftly. This beast was a fighting beast, and was about to be slain by this horror of a weapon-- without even a chance at fairness. Lord Knight was fuming that one of his well-trained dogs had been killed by such a cagey, untusked sliver of an animal. Behind them, the ladies laughed merrily as he charged forward on his coursing horse.

It just wasn't fair. It wasn't right. The prey was too little for such a big spear. It would be splattered to bits, not felled for sport. Zelda almost thought about crying, but rubbed her hand and tensed her leather gloves out of habit.

Then she decided to do something about it.

With a jerk of false surprise, she dug her heels into her horse and laid limp in the saddle as it bolted forward. Her horse spooked as she dropped the reins, and swerved to avoid the bloody mess of dogs in front of it. Zelda slipped from the saddle and screamed as she hit the ground, causing every mount to shy and every eye to look away from the boar and to the fact that _the princess had fallen from the saddle._

She slid down the hill, scraping her arms-- the dogs scattered and when at last the dull pain of the fall caught up with Zelda she found herself looking directly at a dark eye, revealed an animal topaz in the dim light. The prey squealed, and Zelda almost cried. But she managed to find her voice.

"This is mercy," whispered Princess Zelda.

It looked at her with those terrified eyes, and amazingly, he ran away from his fight. The cruel spear lay forgotten as five pairs of boots hit the ground to hurry over to the fallen princess, and to collect her fearful horse. Zelda sobbed, burying the fact that she couldn't explain herself in violent tears.

But the hunting party didn't blame her. It must have been a horsefly, they said to her. She was just a little girl. And hunts were no place for a child, anyhow, and Lord Ordon was mad to have brought her. And the king would not know, for she'd take leisure the rest of the week at the hall and no harm would be done. So long as she did not tell, and they spoiled her not to.

But her father sent her on hunt the next year as well.


	3. Chapter 3

Zelda didn't much like the hunt the next year, either.

It was a scant year, with drought and poor harvest. What little there was to be found in the Ordon woods was weak and slow from bad plant growth, and the local wolves and forest cats were starved and ruthless. The best they got that year was a few braces of pheasants, and a single lean doe. The rest of the week was spent in the hall, away from the cruel summer heat. The ladies entertained themselves with fruit and music and embroidery, and the men with ale.

Princess Zelda skulked off in her lightest linen slip, having packed a small lunch for herself, to go bathing in the spring. The idle amusement of the older ladies was dull to her, and she hadn't swam since she had been caught sneaking into the courtyard fish pond a year ago. And she had never been in a real spring before.

Zelda had spied it as they passed close to the waters' edge while tracking the doe- it was a perfect place, with fine, almost powdery white sand and no rocks or mud underfoot. Zelda dropped her lunch in the crotch of a tree, basket sealed firmly shut, and waded down from the water's edge. She paddled happily in the shady lagoon for some time, feeling the cold water against the hot air and the little reeds flick against her bare feet.

As she swam in to eat her lunch, she noticed a crumpled heap on the beach, propped up against a fallen log. It had not been there the day previous when she had seen the beach the first time. Zelda was drawn to it out of curiosity, crawling in from the water sopping wet in her slip on hands and knees.

It was some kind of animal, encrusted in dirt and mud. Its hair was tatted with sand. Flies swarmed around a red, festering streak that had seeped into the grit below it, dried brown.

Zelda dared to edge near it, noting a long, slim stick that sprouted from its shoulder. She was very slow, almost inching to it. She never had been good with dead things. But she had to know what it was, to see it up close.

The head snapped up, a sharp squeal piercing the still surface of the spring. Zelda stumbled backwards, biting her cheek to keep from screaming and being heard at the hall only a brisk walk down the path away. The animal was a wild swine, and alive. Its head drooped lamely, the shriek trailing off into a raspy wheeze. Barely alive, anyway.

"I'm sorry!" apologized Zelda. "Please don't hurt me!"

For even little forest swine, she had been told, were angrier and more dangerous than any wildcat. She had gotten the lecture from her somewhat cross mother last year when she had told her story, she now knew the danger. They ate the green and the flesh, alive or dead. In times of drought (like this year!) they would even hunt like dogs, going after the young and weak: after little girls, Mother told her. Just like her.

But this one was so heavily wounded it didn't seem to care. It stared at her and she stared back at it, almost afraid to move. It didn't move, either.

Zelda found herself sweating in the dry heat, and wished that she was maybe an older, braver knight and not a princess of barely twelve years. Then she would know what to do. The boar's eyes were still open, blinking slowly. Its stare was not yet deathglassy and the dark pupils darted around like dragonflies, as if looking her up and down. The eyes were ringed a pale color, not brown like a deers' but an owlish yellow.

But it was the _way _the eyes moved that struck her. Zelda had been on two hunts so far, and deer didn't look at what attacked them. Birds didn't focus on humans; their eyes didn't give people that sort of care. But Zelda had seen this particular stare before. It was telltale, unforgettable.

"You're the same one!" she almost cried out in surprise. "You're the same pig as the last hunt season! The one that killed the dog!"

It merely looked at her and rasped weakly. Indeed, it was the same. There were scars on its dirty legs where the dogs had bit it, and it was just the right size. Tiny nubs of filthy white protruded from its jaws, the barest suggestion of sprouting tusks.

"Stop it, pig. I fell off my horse to save you! Did you know that?"

It ignored her, barely mustering the strength to weakly lift its head in the direction of the water's edge, but could not do so much as roll over to reach it. Zelda bit her tongue. What am I doing, she wondered, talking to a dead, mean animal? Of course it wouldn't care that I saved it. It doesn't even know. It's just a beast.

But then again, it's not like I speak beast when it can't speak tongues. Maybe this will have to do.

Zelda scooped some water up in her small hands and cupped it with her fingers. On a whim, she edged on her knees closer to the boar, offering it with outstretched arms. It snapped at her, and she drew back. But Zelda was unconvinced. She took another scoop of water, an especially large one that spilled over her arms and wet her knees. Clear splattered drops were eaten by the sand, just outside the boar's reach. It gazed at the cool, clean water intently, opening and closing its mouth a bit. Then it outstretched its neck, trying to reach the treasure itself. That was when Zelda let herself get a little closer, and let the boar's snout touch the drink in her hands and suck it up with desperate greed.

"Do you want some more?"

The boar almost managed to get to its feet, it was so enthusiastic after her generous offer. Zelda laughed despite herself, feeling the nose snuffle into her fingers. She retrieved another handful of springwater and the boar downed that as well. This was probably a terrible idea, she thought. Wild animals were wild and hated people. It wasn't right.

But helping those in need was the best kind of right. So maybe they canceled out.

The drink strengthened the little animal and soon it began to flail a bit, worming down closer to the edge. Soon it was able slurp furiously at the water, sputtering it breathed so heavy to do so.

Zelda looked at the boar, unobscured by the fallen log. Its- his, the boar was not a sow- his ribs showed through, waist dangerously thin and legs wasted on hunger. He was so dirty the mud cracked as he moved.

"Can I touch you, master boar?"

It sucked at the spring and paid her no heed. It did freeze as her fingers touched the coarse hide, grunting softly. But it laid down with its snout above water, resting head in the cool shallows.

"Oh," she said. "You're filthy."

Carefully, Zelda slid around to the front of the boar and splashed a bit of water up against his side, melting a little grime off. He didn't seem to mind. Then she poured more on him, dripping brown and bloody streaks into the spring. The flies scattered. "Ew!"

He unsteadily rose to his hooves and surprised Zelda, wading a little farther into the water. There he stood, planted on the bottom and knee-high to Zelda from shore, soaking with snout above the surface, paying Zelda little mind.

"You are a very odd beast," said Zelda.

The boar stared at her, almost expectantly. The eyes were strangely reasonable.

Zelda waded out with him and looked back, pursing her lips. Then, hesitantly, she began to rub the mud from his back. It was slow going, for the short bristles were tough and matted. But after a while spots began to feel clean, and it all crumbled off easier after a soak. By the end of it, the boar made a strange sound, a kind of heavy breath or rumbling from the throat and belly. Zelda's hands ached once the animal was clean; the stiff hair brushed her hands, wearing them a little raw and numb. But her fingers alighted on the arrow shaft embedded in his shoulder, and the boar gave a sharp grunt.

"That looks really bad," she said. "May I try to take it out?"

Of course there was no answer.

"Please don't get angry with me."

Still nothing. Only an animal in the water. Zelda took a deep breath and put a hand on the arrow shard. She could feel where it had twisted into the flesh, and she had seen how the hunters had removed arrows without ruining meat or hide. Zelda gripped the arrow, counted to three, and yanked it out as smoothly as she could. The boar screamed at her, floundering in the water before going still and breath-heavy.

The blood welled up from the open wound. "Ugh!" Zelda grimaced, but pressed hands to the deep puncture. The arrow drooped below the surface, forgotten as it sank. Zelda could feel the heat from the wound leaking into the water, but she still pressed it closed until the red stain in the water congealed and the flow slowed to a stubborn stop. Exhausted, the boar hauled himself out of the shallows and collapsed in a patch of warm sand to dry. Zelda decided to do likewise and spread-eagled herself on the beach.

"Thank you for being so reasonable, master boar," she said, though it was mostly to herself.

The sun dried them. Zelda ate her lunch there while the boar slept, but saved the wine to pour onto his wound, and a handful of sweetmeats to leave for him on a spare napkin. She curtseyed goodbye and then was scolded back at the hall for getting her hair crusty with sand.

Despite that, she returned to bathe the next afternoon and found the boar wallowing in the water. Each morning Zelda greeted him politely, and he did not protest her presence. He would sleep in the sand, and she would clean his wound with wine when he couldn't feel the sting. It closed in three days.

When Zelda had to leave, she went to the beach and gave a shallow bow to the beast she found there.

"It was a fair trade," she said in parting. "I was polite to you, so you were polite to me. You are a good, brave beast. Eat lots of food to get big and strong, and don't fall into trouble, please?"

When she went home, she told her mother all about her new friend young master boar, but she was not believed. Though whatever her mother the queen thought, Princess Zelda hoped that somewhere in the forest the boar would respect her wishes.


	4. Chapter 4

Zelda escaped the Lord Ordon by slipping off for forest air and going on a walk. All through the past year, Ordon had been trying to win her favor. Nothing too drastic. Merely the small efforts to comfort her, perhaps with a lavish gift at her birth-day feast. But Zelda knew a weasel when she saw one. He had once again asked after her for his annual hunt- he was below her station and hoped to impress her, Zelda's ladies had said to her. They told her again and again, gossiping to themselves all the while. He had a fancy. Zelda, at thirteen years of age, found that repulsive. Yet there was nothing she could do to avoid the annual hunt. Save slip off when it was in session, of course.

At least have the decency to try me with your son, not your old goat of a self, she thought. Father must be blind.

The spring had been mild and wet, even wetter than was common. The barren sand was cut through with rivulets where the roots couldn't keep rain from swelling the banks. Moss had crept forward, almost overtaking the white beach. Without the sun to beat back the surge of the spring, even the stark rocks were slick and wet where they met the shore. It was a very different place than the one she had left the year before, without everything so shriveled back.

Zelda set down her satchel, kicked off her shoes and sat herself on one of the rocks. Her feet dipped into the water, and she looked out across the misty surface before opening her book to read. She could have read at the hall, yes. But not without a swine calling after her every few moments.

In a manner of speaking. She felt a faint movement as something nudged up against her side. Zelda turned around to see a wriggling snout rooting about her sack, playing with the strings that bound it up. A wide smile cracked Zelda's face, feeling rather childish again for the first time in months.

"It's you again," she exclaimed. "Have you been waiting for me all this time?"

His interest turned from the bag to her in his characteristic strange way, as if the subject had somehow changed from the contents to the fact that she had spoken. He looked at her expectantly, almost impatiently.

"Oh, fine."

Zelda opened her satchel and removed one sticky bun and set it out in front of him to see what he would do. He looked at it, then at her as if he did not know what to do with it. It smelled delicious, even to Zelda, and she could see his mouth open slightly, teeth champing for the treat. Zelda broke off a portion for herself, wondering if he was afraid of the exotic food. She bit into it as if to demonstrate how, but as soon as she did so he became enthusiastic about the meal and devoured his own share. And when he was finished, he did not clamor after hers as she expected he would: content to stare at her as she chewed thoughtfully.

How curious, she remarked. For a swine, he has excellent manners.

Until that point in time she had wondered if she had just made it all up a year ago, maybe because it had been so hot and she must have been bored. There was a big difference between twelve and thirteen years, in her mind. Perhaps the silly little me had been weaving a story, she thought. But no. Little master boar was still as he ever had been. Zelda set her book back in her bag and turned her full attention to him.

"You look very well, boar," she said. "It must have been a good season for you, with all the rain and the mushrooms."

True, he had flourished a little taller, but had filled more than he had grown. His skin no longer stretched like canvas over tentpole bones, and the hindquarters had gotten stouter and stronger. But most of all, he had become sleek and trim, Like one of the pretty animals from the hunt paintings in the gallery, thought Zelda. Hardly comical and sway-bellied like the swine in the sowyard she could just barely see in a corner of her bedroom window.

"I'd even say handsome. Er, for a pig, at least, " she said. "And I see you have tusks now, too. Keep this up and you'll be king of the forest in no time at all."

The tusks she referred to were little triangular points of white sticking out from the jowls, but the sentiment was there and that was what mattered. She fancied that masculine pride was rather universal, and if she was going to pretend she could talk to an animal there was no point playing the game halfway.

The boar ambled over and collapsed by her side quietly, basking on the cool stone. He looked down into the water as it lapped rather lazily. One of his front hooves dipped in idly, rippling the surface.

This did and did not seem quite right. For one, the hunt had taken down a wild boar earlier in the day, and she had seen it all. It had been an old, frightening specimen and had nearly gored the largest hound in the run. She had seen for herself what a terrible creature it had been, screaming and flailing broken tusks around. This one did not act proper for a wild animal at all. She had been able to dismiss it a year previous, but now she was so much more grown-up in her eyes it seemed strange.

Nice animals belonged in pages, in her mother's voice when she told fairy stories. Nice animals were the dog and sheep that could talk in her book of fables. They weren't supposed to run around actual forests, with actual little girls.

But the scene was so nice and calm. And there was no Lord Ordon to bother her. And her fairytale friend was there to make her forget about what she would have to go back to at the hall. Everything was as it had been a year ago, when she had been twelve and there had been a lot more wonder in the world.

Hesitantly, she put a hand on the animal, and he did not object. His hide was not pleasant by conventional standards, but the feeling of the bristles over her fingers was entertaining. There was a ridge at his back where the hair began to wash out and lengthen into long, springy strands that were oddly soft-feeling in how yielding they were. They were rusted over with a sun-stain color that tinted them reddish in the hazy light. Her hands found fine, faint lines in the fur that were rather pretty and almost symmetrical in pattern. They crisscrossed the snout and met in the forehead as a swirl of scattered golden hairs.

Really, Zelda wondered how she had recognized the beast when he had done so much shedding in the past year. Even the colors of the coat were different. She had only seen him for the one he was because of his odd behavior, and his eyes that darted around to see, rather than just look.

A very strange beast. But an excellent friend. "You have funny ears," she said idly, referring to how the coarse fur stuck out and fanned from the edges. They prickled at her, as if shaking off a fly. Irritation, perhaps?

But that was foolish. Beasts weren't there to be irritated. Or even separate words from noise. "And a funny nose," she continued. "Really, you aren't so terrible a fellow after all. Just proud, maybe."

He sniffed and stared at her relentlessly. Why was it so easy to put emotion to this beast? Zelda was fascinated. Perhaps she should just pose the question and be done with it, she thought.

"Are you a fairy in disguise?" she asked politely. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

As if she was stupid. What a look from something that barely had a face to use. Zelda had to laugh.

"All right, all right. You're not a fairy. But you are very odd, you know. And very nice."

His head fit into her lap well. Like a dog, maybe. Or something smarter, like a child. Or even like a nice boy tired from playing around.

"I can't just keep calling you 'boar' forever," she said. "And I don't think you can... um, keep calling me whatever you call me in the tongue of beasts. I don't speak it, and I don't know. I'm Zelda."

Princess of Hyrule, she amended in her head.

"What's your name?" she asked. He couldn't answer, so she did. "Let me see. It has to be a proper name, fierce but also smart and good."

Zelda did not really have to think. "Ganon," she blurted out. She thought she had heard it somewhere before, like in an old bedtime story. "I like how it sounds, don't you?"

He didn't object. And so Zelda called him Ganon henceforth.


	5. Chapter 5

Zelda was startled awake by a tapping at the window. There was no more rain; it had been sloppy-wet for days, and the hunt had been a disaster. And to her the night was still frightening in the woods, with no men awake to watch for thieves or bears. The stillness after the pelting downpour when she'd laid down was jarring. Then the silence was broken again by another three sharp raps on the window, the same as a moment before. Zelda tossed off her bedroll, nervous of the other ladies, and drew away the shutters to see who had come to call.

A nose stretched up just into the window, hooves propped up on the sill to reach to her room. Just his snout managed to clear the height, like a squirming invader, searching by scent. Ganon, the boar, had been rapping on the wood with sharp tusks thicker and more curved than she remembered. Zelda stuck her head out the window and into his rather inquisitive eyes and got the impression that he had come here with a specific purpose in mind. It was too easy to put words in the animal's mouth.

"Just a moment," she whispered, and closed the shutters quietly. Then she threw on one the squires' tunics, breeches, boots. Over it she wrapped herself in one of her light cloaks and tucked a knife into the pocket. Ganon was still there, waiting patiently for her. Zelda scrambled a little, but made it out the open window. "I'm sorry I haven't made it to see you. It's been so rainy this year. You must love the mud."

But that didn't seem right, for he didn't have a spot on him and he hardly reeked. For a boar, he was incredibly fastidious. Then again, he fancied wallowing in springwater. He pressed his nose into her waist, sniffing curiously.

"I'm wearing someone else's clothes so I don't get caught," she explained as she closed the shutter from the outside. "It's not my fault you're a boar, with weak sight."

It could have been her imagination, but he almost looked insulted. For all of his poor vision, his eyes were unexpectedly bright. They were much closer to her than she remembered. He'd gotten tall. And doubled in weight: his hoofprints cleared the width of a man's fist.

"Don't come around here, Ganon. You're big enough now to be something they'd make a point to hunt. I don't think they've ever caught a boar as big as you that wasn't old and hurt."

He ignored her and turned to walk around the back of the hall, pausing when he reached the corner. He looked over his thick shoulder and stared at her with animal eyes. Zelda hurried to follow, knowing she'd never get to sleep if she went back. He didn't stop walking along the road, and Zelda went along by his side in alien, uncomfortable boots. She didn't say anything for a good long while, not wanting to break the sense of adventure. Every so often, when they came to a road sign Ganon would amble up to it, rear himself up onto it and smell, as if gauging who had been there before. A rider passed them in the other direction on the road, but they'd pulled into the trees before they had been seen.

After a mile or so, they came to the region's small village, remote and full of seasonal trappers, hunters, and a few ranchers and farming men. The street was lonely and dark, bare with packed dirt and nearly naked cottages. Not even dogs whined as they passed like ghosts. There was no night-watch to be seen and Zelda found something nice and forbidden about skulking around just so. Exciting, even.

The first place he went was a vegetable plot, and then a small orchard. He ransacked both, but ate little. Almost in the spirit of fun, and to Zelda it _was_ fun: a childish wrecking fun that made her feel little again. She drew mean faces in the garden dirt and picked a peach for herself and ate it to the pit; the first time she had ever had fruit not only raw but whole. The juices made her fingers sticky and sweet.

Having a savage romp under the eye of the moon, Zelda felt almost a beast herself. In a good way: untameable, free, able to do whatever she wanted because she wanted it. If only she could whoop or scream, or laugh. She didn't know. It was good, wicked fun, and to her taste more wholesome than anything had been in a long time.

They continued that way down the main street of the tiny village, displacing a few pumpkins here, messing up the grass there. Zelda spied a jar of tree honey on a windowsill and swept it into her cloak: feeling a little bad but the game of the night eclipsed whatever guilt she might have taken. Even if she got caught with a muddy cloak come morning, who would believe that the Princess of Hyrule herself had stolen someone's jar?

She turned around to see Ganon propping himself up on the door of a small shack, quietly nosing the latch open and slipping inside. In a moment he emerged with a whole smoked leg of goat grasped in his jaws. Zelda giggled; the butcher would curse in the morning, wouldn't be able to figure out the animal tracks inside paired with a perfectly pristine hook and an open door.

It was some time, halfway down the streambed way, that Zelda began to tire her sleepy self out, and think more deeply on the boned meat in Ganon's mouth.

He hadn't even batted an eye at the scraps and waste simply lying around the butchery yard. Zelda was aware that her friend was almost obscenely sharp for an animal, but this was more than cleverness or her own interpretation of animal behavior. Even beyond perhaps figuring out the latch.

To shun the easy scraps and instead opt for civilized food. How very un-piglike, even for Ganon. In fact, it was almost personlike. Not even almost... it was chilling...

Her thoughts abandoned her as the sound of loud footsteps rounded a street corner- Ganon and Zelda fled behind a building. The Princess felt her heart whip the inside of her ribcage, she was sure they'd been caught when the steps came close, following them.

They retreated behind the back steps of the loghouse, hiding in the deepest shadows of a wooden terrace. She stood perfectly still, almost unable to breathe and definitely not able to see very well.

Even so, she could hear just fine. There were two sets of footsteps, not one, and they stopped behind the building yards away without following Zelda and Ganon deep into the overhang. In the murk, a pale halo outlined their hair and clothes and painted them ghostly. Then, the men began to talk.

"It is done?"

"What are you trying to play me for, old man?"

The first was older. The last was younger, but not by much. Zelda found she couldn't pay attention to what the men said; Ganon set down his meal to edge closer- Zelda wanted to protest _what was wrong_ with the beast. Really, any beast would have started to tear at the meat instead of abandon it. The only reason available is that men had started talking and he wanted to hear, and to make that a reason he needed to know tongues. He couldn't _not_ have, with the way his eyes flicked from speaker to speaker. Zelda had always thought that he focused on her because he knew not to flee or fight her. But he did not fight or flee now, he paid attention along with her.

Perhaps he simply likes noise, Zelda thought. But that couldn't be right. No other sounds made his eyes move other than voice. Maybe he likes the noise of voice. But that wasn't quite right either, because the gravel of the old men and her own voice were completely different.

He barely grunted or even made animal sounds at all anymore. Like he did not speak that language, or refused to. Zelda thought it bizarre.

"Your job was to kill the girl."

The older man's words bit her awake. Ganon was startled, too, cocking up ears in surprise.

"And I'm telling you I won't take the job anymore! They hid Princess Zelda tonight; they must suspect you!"

The wizened voice creaked out an angry reply. "They suspect nothing. You miss your target one night, and you become a coward?"

"And I won't take the contract. You never said it was the _princess_ I was after!" said the other. "It isn't right!"

"You agree to kill a child, yet balk when you learn of her parentage? You are the worst sort of all." A pause. "Princess, what a joke. Do you truly believe her legitimacy?"

"I'm a dishonest man, but I won't kill the Queen's daughter. The Queen saved us all. No matter if her daughter belongs the King or not."

A bark of a laugh. "The sheeply king couldn't have sired such a feral-eyed little parasite. Spawn of a baseborn goatherd, in reality. It's disgusting."

"If she's sired by the Hero who slew the Dark One, I'll give a bow to her," said the other man. "Din's tits, I can't think of a worthier man."

"That's a pity. I heard he died yesterday in his sleep. No such comfort for you."

Zelda didn't see what happened, but a painful flash lit the narrow way so brightly that it stuck her blind. She ducked, afraid that it would cast her shadow and they'd be caught. There was no scream, but a dull thud and no more sound and no more man when the dancing spots cleared from her eyes. All that was left was a smear of ash, white against the slate, and a smell like roasted fat. Zelda was immediately sick.

Ganon dragged her out of the alcove, hooking her leg with a gentle tusk until she was forced to stumble forward. They hobbled that way through the back alley, white hands gripping his mane of sun-copper bristles for dear life. When the clear air greeted them away from the burn cloud, Ganon began to trot and she had to jog to keep up with him. He snapped a twine fence and they were swallowed by the forest again. They ran that way, with Ganon sniffing a path, until they reached the safe spring clearing at last.

Zelda gasped for air, trying to breathe but only managing to cry. She tried to process what she had seen, what she had heard that night. It was just too much, and trying to sort through it hurt. But she'd never been able to leave things lie, or forget them.

She didn't understand what the old man had said about her to get the other man to take her away. Or, she understood but didn't believe it. He'd do anything to make her seem bad, he was an evil man, probably. But the fact that the Queen was mother, but the King was Father Sire began to feel a little funny in her mind.

Zelda realized that she had been lying on the grass for a full minute, staring up into a huffing snout and two honeyed eyes.

"Don't look at me like that," she said.

He turned away. That he'd obeyed enraged her.

"Stop it!"

The fact that she'd yelled at him made his ears prick up, his eyes grow wide. Yet he still made no sound.

"There's something the matter with you," she said accusingly. "I'm not a little kid anymore, I can tell!"

Zelda half expected the creature to open its mouth and start talking, apologizing for fooling her all of these years. He had done all but speak, but he still was silent.

"You're just pretending to be an animal, aren't you? You've got to be a wizard or a monster. It doesn't make sense," continued Zelda. "Animals eat all the garbage in sight, don't wait, don't open windows, don't sack things for fun or look for cooked food! And they certainly don't know tongues..."

She bit her lip, seeing what was happening to her. The night had been too long. Men had been after her, and she had found out that her father the king was just the king. Of course there was no point trying to put all the blame on the beast.

"I just don't understand it!" she cried out. "It's the least of my worries, but there's just so many lies and I don't even know..."

Zelda didn't really know what crying was like, sincerely, until she curled up into a ball with her forehead pressed between her knees. She sobbed, unable to say much more.

He sat down beside her, once again silently yelling in her face that something along the line had gone horribly, unnaturally wrong with him. Animals fled at yells, or fought at yells. This was neither.

"I want the truth," Zelda demanded, sniffing. "You've understood every word, haven't you?"

He stared at her in terror, though Zelda wasn't sure of what. And as if she had somehow caught him, he stretched a wide pause. But sure enough, in a display that crawled in her heart, Zelda saw him nod a definite _yes._

Then with angered, revealed eyes he turned around and fled into the forest, leaving her alone. Zelda yelled after him, wanted to chase, but she knew he couldn't be found in the dark, in his home woods. The damp summer night was full of angry sounds, all somewhere in the treetops she couldn't see. She clutched her stolen jar of honey and wondered about the spirit of fun, and when the fun stopped.

A fine way to give a fair trade, a vindictive thought fluttered to her. He all but saved your life, keeping you from sleeping in the hall tonight. And this is how you repay him?

The night swirled in her head, too much to grasp. Excitement and horror, yes. More questions added to the mystery. And now men were after her. Her friend had left her, and the wide beach was clammy and cold and lonely. It was going to be that way for the rest of the week, for she never slept in the hall after that, and Ganon never sought her in the clearing again.

She wrapped her cloak around herself and laid down in a patch of grass to shiver and weep. Exhaustion slowly took her, and her last troubled thoughts were of their travel on the road when the night had seemed so full of adventure. The way he clambered up to sniff the signs they passed, shuffling left-to-right until he dropped to his feet and continued on. On the edge of sleep, she realized that his face pressing so close to the signs was to overcome poor vision and Ganon had not been smelling the signs at all.

He had been _reading_ them.


	6. Chapter 6

- Part II-

Zelda disobeyed her father later that year. She stole away to the woods, feigning sickness, and it was in that way in the fall she made her path to the clearing she knew so well. The trees circled orange around her, halfclothed and ragged.

"Hello?" she called, and the words were eaten by the cold, dusty forest. The grass crunched under her calfskin boots, the sound louder than her voice had been. She tried again. "Hello?"

There was no answer. Cold and steely-gray, the spring lapped at the bank, and that made a noise. The wind combed through brush and branches. Late crickets sawed for the morning. But that was all.

No footprints in the dry, cracked dirt. No broken branches. Nothing.

It was very cold, and the spring surface rippled as the draft swirled around Zelda. She'd learned some magic, used it to move herself to this place she had loved so much when she'd been small. Those were good days, when Captain Link had still been alive and had told such wonderful stories. When her mother was not made of such hard stone. When she could wait for summer and not winter to see this place.

She was far too young to think those thoughts. Yet she had them anyway.

"Please come out!" she yelled. "It's okay! I'm not mad!"

Even to the point of forgetting the aching _wrongness_ of her old friend, she needed to see him. To the point of trying at him again. There were so many things she should have yelled out there, she thought. I was wrong, I was foolish. I just want to see you. Please don't hate me. I'm sorry.

And most of all,

I'm lonely.

Thinking these things didn't help. But her throat seized up saying them. Zelda stood in that clearing a long time, waiting. Maybe the sight of a tail over the bushes. Maybe he'd have a softer winter coat on, or maybe he'd have been plump for the barren season. Or maybe he would just come up like he always had, out of some copse of trees, and she would sit with her book. And his belly would be warm, and there they'd lie: safe against the cold.

But none of that happened. He never came, no matter how loud she yelled for him. She was sure he could hear her. So sure of it, and she was so sad and angry at him for not coming. The more she stood there alone in the woods, the more she hiccuped the more her throat itched in despair.

"Fine!" she screamed. "Stay out there! You're just a stupid beast anyway! Why should I care about you?"

She turned around, strode angrily into the forest. She didn't move around bushes; she just tore them out of her way and kept going, walking to the clear path where she could pick herself up and go back to the tower. She tried to keep her face angry, but a kind of blankness kept washing over it. She continued, head down and fists clenched. It was hard to see with cloudy eyes, with cold cheeks wet in trails down to her chin.

A man appeared in her path, which was extraordinary; the backpath from the spring was unknown. But the overjoyed, business smile and the long knife in his grasp cemented that he had been tracking her.

Her heart writhed; he didn't seem like a friendly tracker in the least, especially when he didn't pause to raise the dagger. Zelda ran, but he seized her by the wrist and twisted. She dropped to one knee, joints lurching.

That was the first time her mind truly had raced. The summer, that had been a nail-filled haze. But this was immediate, sudden, awful. A thousand things all at once. In her minds eye she prayed for it to be a fairy tale and Ganon would come and trample the man. Zelda could almost see it. He'd have gotten strong, like one of the mythic forest spirits in her books, and he would come to help her.

That made no sense, she thought. He hated her. Ganon wouldn't come.

And Ganon _didn't _come.

Zelda panicked, groped for her farmovement spell. Alien reflexes pulled on her to fight, to do things her body could not do. But her brain shied, frenzied the magic.

Soon she was back in her study, unhurt but gasping. Then she knew men would find her if she left her watched castle. She knew that as she was, she was easy prey. She knew that it had been a bad idea to go out. It had filled her with hate, put her in danger. She wouldn't do it again.

And above all other things, she went to bed lonely. As she would feel for a long, brutal time.


	7. Chapter 7

She had lost the library. Zelda precariously sat with smeared powder and rumpled dress at a hard, wooden chair and sorted through her mother's affairs. Not many understood, but her world was a shrinking one; to the people, she was merely road-shy and never abroad. Zelda licked her finger, stinging papercuts, and turned the pages of old rosters and record-keeping. She wiped her gaze over pages of sour names: dead men, men that she'd never known and never could know.

But they had something to do with who had summoned the great flash, those years ago. Her mother had searched, just as she had, and between them Zelda VI thought Zelda V the wiser woman by far. Searching here, in these books. She'd gotten so far, and then, the end had come.

Wisdom came with age, but Zelda wasn't foolish enough to believe her mother, heroine on the throne and sole sovereign of the kingdom, had died of natural causes.

First, she had lost the halls: those to paranoia and fear that even if she did not walk alone whatever handmaiden she brought along could be a hired blade. Then, she had lost the comfort of her own quiet room, if a man could steal in by night. Next had come the training hall, where as she grew older any try at archery became less and less appropriate. Zelda had never held ground at court functions; they were not a thing she claimed as comfortable even before the mess had begun.

And now, the last place that she could call home within the palace that was her prison, she had lost comfort in it along with her title as Princess.

Like her mother before her, Zelda VI was Queen of Hyrule, or going to be. Her father, her ill father's life was all that hung in the way, like a veil draped over the face of a cadaver. To be Queen was to be the most imperiled somebody that one could ever be, Zelda was aware. She read deeper; in the morning, her mother's effects and research would be wiped clean by the staff and erased forever.

"What did you see?" she muttered through painted lips. "Written here, what scared them?"

The binding cracked beneath her touch, the smell of leather ill-kept blossoming from the dust. She went over what she knew as true, what she went over in mantra to give her purpose, to stave off frustration and impossibility.

Zelda was sure that two years ago, she had seen a man incinerate another man with magic. The year afterward, someone had traced her with magic, and sent a knifeman after her within minutes. Later times she'd tried to leave the castle, or work magic, Zelda met with similar results. This was a war, she thought, that someone unseen was fighting through agents: punish Zelda for leaving, and she shan't leave. Punish Zelda for sorcery, she shan't learn to retaliate a sorcerer.

But sixteen years of age and imminently a Queen, Zelda no longer could let them coercively train her, like an unruly dog.

This placed the one working against the throne as one with a gift for magic, without doubt. Zelda V had known this; this roster listed every magician of note, into antiquity, of more disciplines and specialties of study than there were leaves in a forest. The volume organized each individual into sub-groups and sub-focuses and sub-signatures of complex classification, to a degree of mathematical absurdity.

The trouble was that there hadn't been a mage college in hundreds of years. Such power in the hands of anyone not directly in royal service? Too dangerous to leave be. Zelda counted herself among the last Hylian magicians. All the same, the dead listed in the book were the last men, the last women, to even possibly wield power in such a magnitude. It had to be one of them, or the legacy of an apprentice.

Easmon Eblis. Focus on divination magics, lesser gods and apocrypha...

Flat Coda, and Sharp Coda. Masters in weaving the resonance of magic into song, crafters of magical instruments...

Filed under dangerous and criminal, the 'twin' Rova, sorceresses of a race Zelda knew nothing of...

Yssala, a conjuress and forger of Rupees...

None of these names stood out as either persons of character, or people that could have left their business unfinished. Until then, a name caught her as the text oozed past bleary eyes: a rock caught in attention's sieve.

Lord Ganondorf, King-Regent of the Gerudo, master of dark arts, war sorcery, curse-weaving, beast-shaping, conjuration and demon-deals...

The syllables dropped like lead weights from Zelda's dry lips.

"Ganondorf."

A worm of sound tunneled deep into her ears, biting at her brain. The fabric of her dress itched at the wrists, snug in a stink of sudden sweat, hem below rattling from the shakes. Looking for desperate confirmation, she read further.

Conspiracy, attempted murder, war crimes, wickedness. Executed, nearly three centuries ago.  
Slain in combat, written in a tiny black ink-scrawl. It was her mother's own, ink dry for only sixteen years.

Zelda swallowed the name heavily, and did her best to move on, but the neat calligraphy continued here, fresher. Zant, a Twilit mage, hanging onto the hem of Ganondorf's dark cloak. Midna, a princess of the Twilight, that same realm that Zelda knew only vaguely of from her mother's personal stories, and the official histories.

A blank entry. Only one crime was listed, and that was, the new threat of Hyrule.

It was instinctive to smell the terrible roast of flesh and find fresh phantom-spots in her eyes, as if curse-fire was fresh. Her mother kept mention of Zelda VI herself out of such a book of records, but there was no mistaking the uncharacteristic waver of the pen, the blot and smear on the left side of the page. Inkwells did not simply spit.

"Ganondorf."

And still, the name stung in her mouth, more even than the late Queen's legacy. Betrayal, deception was the flavor. Only a decade and a half to have lived, but that whole lifetime of lies behind her sat like spoiled milk and soured the stomach. Zelda didn't know why such a name came to her only three years prior. Ages, she thought; thirteen was a child. Before that, a babe.

But names had meaning, had a certain wisdom to them. And what else could the not-beast that read signs, drew close to only her, and relinquished its very nature be but a sort of demon or possessing spirit? What else could actively lie to her without a word for nearly a whole childhood?

The name on the page and its foul crimes, a sense of knowing them, made her prior happiness sick, feverish with panic. Can one reach into the past and pluck oneself away from a necromancer and a manslayer? Her stomach frothed and boiled lamely, cursing that she had ignored every instinct to flee wild beasts.

_He once had been a man, yes. But one with too much sorrow in his heart and too much acid in his wounds._

Zelda's mother had said this once, of the threat she never named but spoke of always with a thousand-year weariness, and a stare to match.

_That's what happens when a man is left behind, betrayed by the world and left to die alone and in pain. _

Zelda closed the book with a _snap_, and clenched her fist so tightly that filed fingernails bit into her palm. Unmuted by the dying lamp-light, a fresh-earned golden sigil carved into her flesh hummed with dim stubbornness. An inheritance.

She heard a knock at the door, the most unwelcome knock of her life.


End file.
